davidpbrown - 11:48 am on May 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

BOM UTF-16 suggests you might have a Byte Order Mark on the front of your file.

You need to save the files UTF-8 without BOM and to do this you need an editor that gives that option.

Several editors are listed on Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources - Multilingual Editors [alanwood.net]. I'd recommend EmEditor having used it..

Some editors save as "UTF"=UTF-16 and not UTF-8. Wordpad on Windows 98 is one that does that.

I expect then data within the file is read as 16byte characters many of which are Chinese.

Alternatively, if you're not using characters outside iso-8859-1 you could simply save all your files as ASCII or iso-8859-1.

HTH